


ties that bind

by wesninskis



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Heart-to-Heart, Neil being slightly more competent than normal, Nightmares, TFC secret santa 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 01:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9098755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wesninskis/pseuds/wesninskis
Summary: Neil and Kevin have A Talk at way-too-early o'clock





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was my gift for the TFC Secret Santa on Tumblr; my partner was Ourdefinitonofbeauty.
> 
> Thanks to Deethedoll on Tumblr for beta-ing for me!!
> 
> I hope y'all enjoy my first posted TFC work

Gasping awake in his bunk, Kevin stared blind-eyed and panicked at the bed above him, his chest heaving. Stuck in a moment of time before true wakefulness, he saw Riko’s snarl as he broke his hand again and again in an infinite loop until his mind finally snapped out of it, wrenching him fully into consciousness. 

Taking a moment to compose himself, he lifted a shaking hand and tapped it against the still semi-new tattoo on his cheek, a quick one-two repeated over and over, a fidget he had taken up shortly after getting it that had yet to see itself out. It was created to remind himself that, if nothing else he was free of Riko, of Tetsuji, even if he could still feel the shackle around his wrists and the collar at his throat pulling taut some nights, threatening to strangle him, pull him down under their weight. Usually the feeling of “the inevitable return to hell” fell away as quickly as it appeared, but sometimes it felt like it might break him, and he lay panting and sweat-slick for seconds or minutes or hours. 

Getting his breath back, he sighed and rubbed his entire face, swinging his legs over the mattress and peeling himself out of his sheets. He wasn’t altogether too surprised to see light seeping in through the crack underneath the door; Andrew and Neil both woke up frequently with nightmares of their own, and half of the time they’d leave the room for the night.

A quick glance told him it was Neil who was up, and that miraculously the sound of both Neil and himself startling awake hadn’t woken Andrew. Slipping out of the room as quietly as he could, Kevin shut the door behind himself and walked out to where Neil was sitting in one of the beanbags, bleary-eyed with a still-steaming cup of coffee in his hands. He looked up when Kevin appeared, and slanted a tired smile at him.

“There’s coffee in the pot still, if you want it,” he told him, lifting his own mug to his lips in emphasis. Nodding, Kevin turned and fixed himself a cup (with none of the creamer that Andrew so favored) and went to sit silently in the second beanbag. A quick glance outside revealed it was only around four in the morning, and he let out a sigh as he stared out the dark window.

“Nightmares?” The words startled Kevin out of his reverie, and he realized that some indiscernible amount of time had passed; his coffee was no longer steaming in his hands, but it wasn’t cold. Looking at Neil, who was patiently waiting for him to answer with his phone dark-screened in his hand, Kevin nodded slowly. 

“You?” Neil nodded, his hand lifting to ghost against his iron-burned shoulder and away again; Kevin wondered if he was even aware of it. “Yeah.” They sat in silence again for awhile, though not nearly as long, and Kevin took a sip of his lukewarm coffee. 

“Do..” he started, frowning and looking away from Neil’s face, “do they ever get better?” There was a long, heavy pause, before Neil answered. 

“They do, and they have,” he said finally, fiddling with his phone to avoid looking at Kevin, even though Kevin had found something incredibly interesting on the windowsill to squint at instead of Neil. “I don’t get the really old ones as much, anymore. The ones about living with my father, and being on the run with my mom before she died. Being around all of you guys helps, and knowing that Andrew is nearby when I wake up. Knowing that he’s dead really helps. But,” Neil continued, looking at Kevin directly for the first time since the conversation started, “I don’t think they’ll ever go away completely, not really. But we’ll get stronger, you’ll get stronger, and they won’t be able to bother you so much.” He looked away again to continue twiddling with his still blank phone. 

“It’s not..not currently the right decision for me, at least not right now, but I think that maybe you should go to a therapist like Bee. Andrew still goes, and if he didn’t think it was worth his time he wouldn’t still be putting up with her.” 

Kevin finally turned away from the Very Important Windowsill Business to watch as Neil got up to put his mug in the sink and pull on his running shoes. He watched as the other boy wrote down a quick note on a pad of paper they kept near the door before leaving without another word. Kevin knew the note was for Andrew, so if the other woke up before Neil got back he’d know that he hadn’t run for good.

Finishing his coffee, Kevin put his mug in the sink next to Neil’s to clean later and stood there, considering. Grabbing a piece of paper off of the pad, he wrote himself a note to call and make an appointment with Betsy in the morning (at a more reasonable time) even though he wasn’t likely to forget it before going back in to bed.


End file.
